えんそく (Field Trip)

We had Wednesday and Friday off from school and nobody wanted to have classes on Thursday, so Geruma wisely planned ahead and had a field trip scheduled. We crossed the bridge to Fukaji, then busted through the gates at the airport and followed the runway down to a trail.

[We took a trail off the end of the runway down to this beach, where we stayed all day]

[First we (they) cleaned the beach (and this garbage did actually return to Geruma for proper disposal)]

[Then we fished. The rest of the day. (I didn't fish, though, because I am elitist about only catching big fish)]

[Hiromi, the new English teacher. She held this pose all day and only caught one fish. She's a champ]

Unproductivity Paying Off

I was busy berating myself for being so unproductive this morning (it's a holiday in Japan) when I heard somebody down on the street call out my name. I opened the door and a girl was on a scooter to tell me that the marlin fishing boat was leaving in five minutes. Not much time, but I can work fast when marlin fishing is on the line.

We took off at 9am and were fishing in big swells by 9:30am. Marlin fishing is defined by long, long periods of monotonous trolling occasionally interrupted by an hour of chaos. Our interruption came at 1:30pm, when a marlin hit our right-most pole (of five). I was the first to hear it and I yelled up to the captain who kicked the engines into gear. I immediately jumped to the nearest pole to begin bringing loose lines in so they wouldn't get tangled in the fight. But on my second crank, another marlin hit the pole I was reeling! So I moved on to the next pole.

I saw one of the marlin jump half out of the water twice, but mostly I concentrated on reeling lines in quickly. The captain had a strange reaction to the situation, differing his normal strategy of putting the boat in gear and keeping the throttle on for many minutes. Perhaps he was also unsure by having two marlin on at once - it certainly confused me!

Unfortunately when I finally (after about 2 minutes) got to grabbing a pole with a marlin on it, both of them were gone. The first marlin somehow cut the line of the second and then he got off himself.

The remaining three hours of trolling were spent thinking about nothing but how I could/should have done things differently. (Ordering the bystanders to bring lines in, even if I can only do it with gestures, and keeping a better eye on the marlin rod to ensure the line stays tight.)

Shellfish Collecting

One of the great things about the Japanese school system is the time allotment towards out-of-school activities. Today at Geruma we partook in something Okinawans have been doing for thousands of years: picking shellfish off the exposed reef during a minus tide.

[carpet of coral]

In Japan...

Where there's food to be served, there's women:

Homemade Pasta

This year I have decided to learn to make more food dishes. It's a good skill to have, always. I've learned about a half-dozen Japanese recipes and am branching out into Western dishes that I enjoy, but cannot buy the ingredients for here (instead I make them). The most recent foray was with my friend, Emina. We followed this video to learn how easy (and time-consuming) it is to make pasta from hand. It was an awesome experience and the pasta was far better than anything from the store.

[Emina with our dough rolled out to the edges of my rolling cloth]

[These finished noodles only took about four minutes to cook]

[The sauce and the garlic toast were also homemade]

Eisa Drum

Eating Over-ripe Food

I remember making a soup last year that was a weak attempt at copycatting a chicken soup I'd been taught. I didn't have any chicken, so I substituted fish (still maintaining the chicken broth base) and also threw in some pumpkin because I was short on other vegetables. It didn't turn out well, but I'd made a lot of it. I kept chipping away for a week, each time knowing I wasn't going to feel very good after eating. Eventually I finished it and complimented myself on the determination I showed at eating through the acidic flavor it had and the discomfort it caused.

Yesterday I made some of my baked tuna fillets into a gourmet tuna salad. I looked up some recipes and settled on a combination of curry powder, yogurt, mayonnaise, and some other things. These were all in addition to the two (opposite) ways the tuna had originally been cooked. It was quite a mish-mash and, if you've guessed correctly, it didn't taste good at all. My head was sorta throbbing afterwards, but I didn't draw a correlation.

Until tonight, when I continued to eat the same tuna (which has been cooled and reheated at least 3 times) and my head really throbbed and now I feel terrible. It kills me to do this, but I think I am going to throw out the last serving.